Awesome Inc U

Awesome Inc U

About

About

Awesome Inc U is a 12-week, full-time web development bootcamp based in Lexington, Kentucky. The program is aimed at beginners, with the goal of preparing them to interview with the school’s employer partners by the end of the program. The school also expects that many candidates will have experience in some related field such as graphic design, math, finance, or project management.

Students will complete at least 10 projects using technologies including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Angular.js, SQL, Ruby, Python, AWS, Git, and Agile development processes. Classes are from 8 am to 5 pm Monday to Friday.

If you are contemplating a career change to web developer, look no further. Awesome Inc U's Web Developer Bootcamp will give you the skills you need to land that web dev job. I was hired before bootcamp was even over!

And by "skills" I mean the really important ones: learning how to learn... where to find help when you are lost... how to know if your code is "finished"... There are a million programming languages, frameworks, and technologies, but these skills will transfer to any web developer job (and many non-web-developer jobs!).

Classroom instruction began with a period of coding "warm-ups" where we tried to solve a problem in code. But the bulk of the day was spent in "lecture" —which should more properly have been called "playground" — where the instructor led us through the topic for the day. Instead of dispensing information during lecture, the instructor modeled the real web dev workflow. "Can we get this text centered? Let's try this..." "Hmm... that broke. Let's see if Google can help us."

We did, of course, start with the basics: HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Then we explored the frontend framework VueJS. On the backend, we learned SQL, PostreSQL, and Laravel (with PHP). Bootcamp culminated in a final project that brought all these technologies together.

But perhaps the most valuable part of my experience was the friendships and connections made. I had been a teacher for 10 years before deciding to switch to web development, and so I didn't know very many web developers or technology companies. I had a very small network going in. But now I have a small group of good friends (the other bootcampers), several mentors (the instructors and administrators)—and I got to meet numerous community business leaders who gave presentations throughout the bootcamp. I will certainly lean on this expanded network as I dive into my new job and beyond!